> Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running.
I'm pretty certain this is scrapers that are trying to workaround blocks on accessing original sites by hitting the Wayback Machine copy instead. Appalling behavior.
In addition to the load it puts on this vital non-profit piece of Internet infrastructure, we've ålso already seen some sites opt out of the Wayback Machine to prevent their content from being scraped via this alternative route.
AI companies should pay billions to wayback machine for access
> We’re getting better at telling abusive bots apart from the people who depend on the Wayback Machine every day. If you think you were blocked in error, email info@archive.org with your operating system, browser, and IP address, and we’ll look into it.
Wow, but I wonder if there's more to it.
I've not been able to access web.archive.org from my work computer - I always get the 429 error.
But I then pull out my phone and can access it just fine. All along I was assuming my company was blocking it. Still weird that it happens every time from my work PC and never from my home one.
I assume that's because the IP range of your company network overlaps with a range used by some scrapers, and if it doesn't happen on your phone even in the corporate network, then IA probably checks some extra signals like the user agent in addition to the IP
Could be due to some scrapers from either your work ISP block, or the larger block which lends IPs to multiple workplaces.
I really appreciate the Archive team's efforts to make the Wayback Machine more responsive, and have donated a few times to support them.
Unfortunately, the restrictions have been way too strict for the last few months: from my residential IP, simply moving the mouse on the calendar for a specific URL is enough to get stuck on 429 error messages for a while; and from corporate ISPs (for example, on airport WiFi), you often can't access the WM at all. I hope they'll find a way to relax those.
I wonder if they'll end up behind Anubis at some point. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.
Why not put it in S3 with downloader pays?
As a public resource the hope is for Wayback to be free to access. I imagine putting up a paywall would be their last resort.
Why not just offer a paid endpoint for the crawlers? It's not like the demand is going to go away anytime soon.
It serves nobody except CloudFlare and hardware companies when one side set up blockers and the other side spend money putting VPN SDKs in consumer TVs.
I am also curious how the (Russian?) paywall bypass mirror archive.is is doing given that they are probably subject to similar amounts of traffic.
Sites would just block the Internet Archive crawler as well.
My guess? Because even with a paid endpoint, the type of unscrupulous yahoo that is DDOSing IA today would probably still abuse the free endpoints because they can. The revenue that might come from a paid endpoint could help to scale up, but with how slow IA usually seems, I suspect there is an upper limit to how much traffic they can serve without a LOT more revenue.
This is a major "this is why we can't have nice things" situation in my opinion. IA is one of the most valuable gems of the Internet. The only thing that even comes close to preserving our shared history. The damage being caused (both by the effective DDOSing and by the knock-on impact that abuse has in encouraging publishers to remove their content from the archive) is incredibly serious.
It’s one thing to archive other companies content, it’s another to sell the access to it
Yeah, who does the Internet Archive think it is, (insert literally any AI company here)?
Which AI company is selling access to reliable verbatim copies of websites? I don't mean "it may regurgitate a paragraph", but as a reliable service where you can repeatably get website content snapshots to a reliability level that makes such a use case viable?
Using the information for training purposes is not the same thing. Not legally the same and otherwise.
That's for the lawyers to sort out, they have a lot of flexibility as a US nonprofit. The case law isn't that clear cut for this.
Internet Archive was almost destroyed by a copyright lawsuit from book publishers within the last few years. I expect they aren't excited to take on any additional risk of similar lawsuits right now.
They need access to sites to archive them. It's already hard to do it as it is, imagine if they start selling access to content. They'd be shooting themselves on the foot, independently of what the law says.
major [citation needed] on that. There are very limited exceptions to the massive power of copyright -- and they're mainly granted to libraries in the form of narrow waivers. And just the cost of fighting the most powerful copyright holders can bankrupt you -- especially if you're a relatively modestly-funded nonprofit.
[flagged]
Correct, and nothing wrong with that.
xcancel doesn't scrape Twitter and is an entirely different matter.
Does xcancel scrape twitter? Isn't it more like a proxy for specific user requests to view tweets?
It's almost as if moral values aren't assigned universally.
No one is upset that the AI companies are scraping the web, they’re upset how poorly implemented the scrapers, but the scraping itself is fine. Lots of people and businesses scrape the web.
Yes, anything that potentially costs Elon Musk money is objectively a good thing. :)
Yeah cuz X is fucking shitty, why would I want to give them any traffic?
Then... don't? If it sucks so much why do you need to read the tweets?
Great take: "This private website is owned by a man I don't like, so I refuse to pay for it - or even give it the possibility to monetize my traffic with ads!"
Still quite mainstream take: "... so I'll use an adblocker on it"
Immature take: "This private website that I hate and boycott is also an important part of our culture, but the posts on it are too important and valuable to ignore, so I'll use a proxy to scrape it"
You're giving them attention, thus validating their existence and their numbers.
“It’s ok to do bad things to people/things I don’t like”
Feels good when you get to dish it out doesn’t it?
This is absolutely something that's happening. There are even paid scraper API's that offer "Wayback Machine fallback" as a feature.
*APIs
It's an open secret that you can often circumvent paywalls by searching Wayback.
Every single paid article linked on HN has the way back machine link as the very first comment.
The links are usually to Archive.today (aka archive.ph and a bunch of other domains), not Wayback Machine (which is run by Internet Archive).
What sites would they be targeting? Generic "just give me anything"? Whenever I check regular sites on IA, the coverage is spotty -- they'll have the homepage and a few important pages, but it quickly fizzles out.
Very understandable, you can't store all 15000 pages of any random website and update them etc etc, but that makes them pretty useless for indirect scraping because you usually don't want a tiny taste, you want everything.
It is. They will most likely eventually need to move to a walled model for Wayback due to scraper aggressiveness (like Reddit deprecating anonymous old.reddit.com), or behind Cloudflare for aggressive bot and scraping protection. Hard to defend against abuse of a public resource when its intent is public access with as little restriction as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
(no affiliation)
Reddit has no excuses for the anonymous old.reddit.com removal; they're simply greedy.
On the other hand, the Internet Archive is a non-profit offering a free public resource.
Examples provided as technical examples, strong feelings are out of scope for this thread.